Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Burger Queen

Snort. (Via Pangadon).

At this Point I am Beyond Surprise

“The patient then was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. … In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die. … Doctors advised that he would ‘basically be a vegetable,’ said the congressman’s aunt, […]

Credentials

Based on a letter I wrote this morning and plan to send this afternoon (once I look up the right address), from now on I’d like to be known as ‘Nobel Prize-nominated blogger, Kieran Healy.’ I’m up for consideration in Physics. I nominated everyone here at CT as well, except Montagu because prizes aren’t awarded […]

Storming the Hospice

Bloggers with more patience than me have been dealing with the tragic story of Terri Schiavo. Lindsay Beyerstein has been especially good. It’s clear that the Republican position on Schiavo is sheer grandstanding and hypocritical to boot. There’s plenty of evidence for this, what with President Bush’s signature on the Texas Futile Care Law and […]

Violent Societies

While thinking about the deterrent effect of the death penalty I wondered about cross-national variation in rates of violent death. Comparative data on homicide rates undoubtedly exist, but I don’t have them to hand. I do have OECD data on death rates due to assault, though, so here’s a nice picture of this trend for […]

Deterrence and the Death Penalty

Eugene Volokh quotes extensively from a new paper by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule that presents an argument for the death penalty based on recent studies that find it has a deterrent effect on potential murderers. In particular:

Disaggregating the data on a state by state basis, Joanna Shepherd finds that the nation-wide deterrent effect of […]